Literary Mama Blog

Inside Higher Ed

LM columnist Libby Gruner and six other women are blogging at InsideHigherEd.com on the subject of combining family life with a career in higher education. The writers are all contributors to the anthology, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, edited by LM columnists Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. The weekly blog rotation goes like this:

Monday: The Career Coach Is In by Megan Kajitani
Tuesday: Mid-Career Mothering by Libby Gruner
Wednesday: ABCs and PhDs: Biologists at Home, by Dana Campbell, Liz Stockwell, and Susan Bassow
Thursday: Math Mom by Della Fenster
Friday: Drama Mama by Anjalee Nadkarni

Join the conversation at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/mama_phd

Special Needs Mama

Vicki Forman, LM's Special Needs Mama columnist has won the 2008 Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction for her memoir, "This Lovely Life." The book will be published in the summer of 2009 by Houghton Mifflin and she will be a fellow at Bread Loaf that summer as well.

Who We Are

C. Delia Scarpitti, Columns Co-Editor has a new poem,
"The Lament of the Bearded Lady" that just went live at the flash-literature pioneer magazine, Flashquake.
She was also recently awarded a grant from her home state as an Emerging Artist in Fiction for 2008 based on her novel manuscript, Migration Summer. More info about that can be found at Delia's website:
www.cdeliascarpitti.com

Two Angry Moms

Are you sick and tired of packing your kids’ lunch box everyday because the cafeteria food is unfit for human consumption? Do you feel guilty when your kids “buy”? Are you annoyed at all the junk being handed out and sold at school? Are you angry enough to do something about it? We are!

Two Angry Moms is a documentary that asks the question: What happens when two “fed-up” moms try to change the school lunch program? Learn how to host a "sneak preview" at angrymoms.org.

toyless play enhances child's imagination

The recall of millions of toys made in China because of safety concerns is a scandal so big that the head of one manufacturer hanged himself last month in a warehouse. Now, hoping to restore confidence, the Chinese government is inviting foreign journalists to visit select factories.

Of course toy safety is a concern of every parent, but LM columnist, Jennifer Margulis learned this past year that kids don't need toys.

Read her story, Toyless play enhances child's imagination in Newsday.

Grace Paley, writer and activist dies

“I’m not writing a history of famous people,” she said. “I am interested in a history of everyday life.”

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84.

Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind. (New York Times, August 23, 2007)

Grace Paley is best known for her three collections of short stories, "The Little Disturbances of Man" (1959), "Enormus Changes at the Last Minute" (1974), and "Later That Same Day" (1985). She taught Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence. Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.

Moms Rising/afterschool programs

If you don't already know about MomsRising, here is a great opportunity to see what they are all about:

School hasn't started yet, but... it's already time to start getting our collective ducks in a row about afterschool programs. Did you know that each school day 40,000 kindergartners are home alone after school, and a total of more than 14 million children don't have any place to go after the final school bell rings?

TAKE ACTION FOR AFTERSCHOOL PROGRAMS: For the first time in years, Congress is considering a needed increase in federal funding for the afterschool programs that keep kids safe, help working families, and inspire students to learn.

*Click here to email a letter in support of these programs to your Congressperson today: Democracy In Action

MomsRising has a goal of bringing millions of people, who all share a common concern about the need to build a more family-friendly America, together as a non-partisan force for 2008 and beyond. This grassroots, online effort is mobilizing mothers, and all who have mothers, across America as a cohesive force for change. Started this May 2006, MomsRising already has over 120,000 citizen members--and is growing by 500 to 4,000 per week lately, as well as more than eighty (and growing) aligned national organizations, working together to create positive solutions for the future.

Author Terry Ryan passes away.

Terry Ryan, author of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, passed away on Wednesday, May 16th at her home in San Francisco after a battle with cancer. Ryan's mother daughter memoir tells the story of a woman who, "raised ten kids on twenty-five words or less." The memoir was made into a movie staring Julianne Moore and recently reviewed by LM's Caroline Grant in Mama At The Movies. Read a local story about Terry Ryan at,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/17/BAGP0P3U2E115.DTL

The Mommy War Machine

Journalist E.J. Graff asks the question, do The Mommy Wars really exist? In the Sunday, April 29, 2007 issue of The Washington Post. Graff says,

"The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds -- and marketing machines -- of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950's. All the while the number of working mothers has been rising."

Graff says that 75 percent of mothers with school age children work "because they have to. And most stay-at-home peers don't hold it against them."

Have we been pushed by the media, (The Oprah show, Dr. Phil, book publishers and even The New York Times) to believe we're fighting a war that doesn't exist? Read The Mommy War Machine.

Hip Mama Essay

Would you give a newborn baby a sugar cookie? Even if you were desperate? Read about that first cookie in Caroline Grant's essay on Hip Mama. Caroline edits Literary Reflections and writes the column Mama at the Movies.

Focus on Amy Hudock!

This month, Literary Mama profiles our brilliant Editor-in-Chief, Amy Hudock. Read about the birth of our magazine and get an insight into the woman who got us all started and keeps us all going.

Amy is also currently featured in SKIRT! magazine's "she'ssoskirt" section. "Motherhood is how I found my voice," Amy says.

Literary Mama Poem featured on Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts Blog

"Rapunzel's Mother" by Carolyn Williams-Noren (currently featured in the Literary Mama poetery department) was discussed on the Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts blog this week as part of a focus on the Rapunzel myth. Congratulations, Carolyn!

Former LM Editor & Columnist in San Francisco Chronicle

Former LM editor and columnist Sophia Raday is featured in a San Francisco Chronicle article on how military families are coping with the war. As the conflict approaches its four-year anniversary, Sophia’s husband has been deployed to serve in Iraq. Meanwhile, Sophia is at work on a memoir based on her LM columns. Look for more about her book here soon!

Washington D.C. Reading & Signing

If you're in the Washington D.C. area, please join us for a champagne toast and reading to celebrate the launch of Not What I Expected: The Unpredictable Road from Womanhood to Motherhood. The anothology includes a story by LM Fiction Editor Suzanne Kamata, and a piece by Donna Vitucci that originally appeared in Literary Mama. Books will be for sale and signings are encouraged!

Tuesday, March 20th
7pm-10pm
The Lyon Park House
414 N Fillmore
Arlington, VA 22205

LM Fiction Editor Reading at Four Stories Event

Literary Mama Fiction Editor, Suzanne Kamata, will be reading from her forthcoming novel Losing Kei at the Portugalia Bar and Grill in Osaka, Japan, Sunday night, March 18. This event is an offshoot of the popular Boston reading series, Four Stories. But don't worry if you can't make it to Osaka. You can download and listen to an MP3 recording of the event in a week or so. LM columnist Jessica Berger Gross was a reader at last November's Four Stories. You can listen to Jessica read her essay here.

Single State of the Union

Editor-in-Chief Amy Hudock and columnist Rachel Sarah have essays appearing in Single State of the Union, which has just been published by Seal Press. Way to go!